Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

final touches

201 final touches Rosemary Catacalos The third and last day given to us is gray. We are not surprised. We rise separately, dress in different rooms, avoid looking at one another except in the safe distance of the mirror and then only briefly. The glint of your silver shaving brush is quicker this morning, having so little light to catch. It is as if God had grown a tin eye overnight. It is as if the whole world could go blind in sympathy watching us trying to put everything away without touching it, watching us fail so miserably. You tell me how you will pack your books and I think it is the same story I’ve heard since childhood, the one with the moral about how to laugh at the end. I leave you at the corner searching for something to carry you away. No tears on either side. By the time I let myself look back you’re gone and it’s too late to be turned to stone or to salt. I remain conventionally human, having to drag this bulging grief around in its same used skin, its same divided cells. 202 Risk, Courage, and Women I try to remember joy. I try to remember seven years ago in Spain, the sea pressing in on all sides, the olive trees and almond-heavy air always forcing us together, always forcing us apart at the last minute. I try to remember the first and only kiss before now, a promise in the dark stairwell of a Paris hotel named after a martyr who died by fire. I try to remember all the fond waiting since then, the certainty we shared. The drunken phone calls at holidays and times of crisis. The poems and birds crossing and re-crossing the continent between us, now north toward stamina, now south toward grace. I try to remember finally rushing into the arms of these last three days, how at first we stood dumbfounded, how quickly we learned abandon and rose out of ourselves and became one overwhelming thing and shouted and shouted like open country. I try to remember how perfectly we both rode out over the edge of the world at long last, past the open mouths of astonished stars and every possible invention of beauty. I try to remember these things and in some ways I succeed after all. This is what I know how to do. seams of our lives 203 This poem, this rude crutch I use to limp toward whatever else there is. I’m not new in this business. I know how to carve my own heart, lean from fat, fruit from sorrow, flower from seed and vice versa. I who sing so much about being woman. I who believe in worshipping my ancestors, in the serious game of enchantment, in the ultimate triumph of memory. When I feel myself beginning to stoop too heavily, I catch my head and throw it back on the sky. Then the fact remains that I love you. I love you and sea stones in hot countries and old produce vendors who carry small ready change in their ears and so much more. Gracias a la vida. The old-time moral about how to laugh begins to take hold again. Reprinted from Again for the First Time (Tooth of Time Books, 1984). ...